Trakhak

If you're doing the equivalent of a walking-level effort on your bike on moderately varied terrain, you don't need closely spaced gears. At a jogging-level effort, having a larger number of closely spaced gears starts to be useful. If you're going to ride hard, especially if you want to maintain a consistent effort during a ride that's going to last an hour or more, closely spaced gears can help you to maintain your optimum pace.

One thing using a pulsemeter has taught me: using closely spaced gears to keep my cadence at around 90 to 95 rpm (which, by the way, is equivalent to the strides-per-minute pace runners maintain) keeps my heart rate higher, and thus burns calories faster, than pushing harder and spinning slower. Not only that, but spinning up at that cadence hills keeps my legs fresher and makes it easier to maintain that effort level.

tergal

Wow you all pay a lot more attention to your gears (gearing) when you are riding than i do .

If you asking me at any point what gear i am in i would just have to laugh and shrug i only shift to maintain a cadence everything else is to complicated for me when riding to work .

Actually i was thinking of picking up a cheap and nasty single speed as a back up for my normal bike.... why umm because i want one

Mr. Beanz

Do you do your own bike maintenance? When I replace my cassette, I need to know what range I need to replace what I have. If I have a 12/25, it doesn't take much to know that if I am 2 from the bottom, I am in the 14 cog. Of that if I am not in the big 53 ring, I am in the 39.

fietsbob

I take my Bike Friday Pocket Llama with a Rohloff hub, out most often..
small wheel so it uses a single 53t chainring, 16t hub cog ..

Rohloff packe 3 3speed hubs and a mountain drive like 4the big reduction gear
in it, to run thru the hub twice , in the low and high range. [double shift at 7-8]

My Brompton with a Mountain Drive crank does similar, 3,2,1, in the hub
tap low range,
with the heel button
and flick the 3 speed trigger into high.
then down shift the hub thru the other 2 gears.. 6 in all.

back in the JFK 60s, I scored parts to turn my SA3speed into a 3x3x3
[3cube] 27 speed
hybrid drivetrain, 3 speed hub, 3 cog hub cluster, and a triple crank..

Good thing It was a Pretty Dry region, as the steel 3 speed rims
did not offer good braking.

Leo001

I ride a 21 speed Hybrid and /or a 27 speed touring Most times I use the largest front chainring and 3 or 4 of the rear cassette, except on what I consider big hills, than i'm into the lowest ratios, but for 85% of the ride 4 gears would do. Makes me think about one of thoes internal geared hubs!

tergal

Good point, i only do the most basic stuff my self. I guess it is like anything, until you pull it apart a few times you only know that it works, not how it works .

eyemage

I also ride in the big ring in the front while on road bikes. I can attest that Beanz does spin, much more than the average rider. In fact, that is the best way to tell if he's tired, when his spin falters.

Ever ride a tandem? Beanz lovely wife can also attest to this. She has a difficult time adapting to his high cadence when they ride on the tandem. She prefers to mash like the rest of us.

I think most of the pros are coached to be spinners.

downtube42

Zero, on my unicycle. It does, however, have a ~2:1 gear ratio because the crank-arms are shorter than the wheel radius so I travel forward farther than my feet go 'round.

For my flat commute to work, I use two of my 3-speed's gears: one for launching, one to cruise. Not because I need them, but because I like it. Maybe it's a character flaw; I'm okay with that.

My backup commuter (needed because the drive pawl springs on my SA S3C are toast and replacements are hard/impossible to find) has 21 gear ratios (though technically also has no gears), of which typically I use 3. Big ring, 4-5-6. Launch/cruise/go-fast.

My rando bike has 24, of which I typically use about 9. It hasn't been on the big ring in a long long time.

I rode the last 20 km of PBP last year with a Belgian on a fixed-gear. After 1200 km of riding over 80 hours, we were both having fun. It's all good.

bigfred 

Now you've gone and done it!

Mithrandir

I ride in traffic fairly often, and as such I need to keep track of what gear I am in so I can switch to a proper gear for stoplights, so I can easily take off at a decent clip. Tough to explain, but after lots of experience, I feel safer in traffic when I know what gear I am in at all times.

TrojanHorse

I think I've just decided I want one more gear.

bigfred 

So, do we call this g+1?

chasm54

\

Well, of course. Muscle is what makes your legs go round. But to suggest that climbers need "serious muscle" is a mistake. In fact, for them to put on more muscle would often be a disadvantage. If you look at Bradley Wiggins, for example, to turn himself into a climber he has lost serious weight, and given that he was already a multiple Olympic gold-medallist you can be sure very little of that weight was fat. He has lost 7 kilos, about 16lbs, since he was a track pursuiter and is now 151 lbs despite being 6'3" tall. And some of the lost muscle was off his legs. Look at him and you will see that they are extremely thin.

What matters is power to weight, as you say, and extremely high levels of aerobic fitness. If you have the gearing right, your muscles don't need to be particularly strong - no stronger than they have to be to allow you to run up a flight of stairs. Your weight has to be low enough, and your cardiovascular system efficient enough, to allow them to keep doing that for a long time without going anaerobic. Strength and endurance are rather different things.

tergal

Is funny after posting this i went for a quick ride up to the shops to get a new rear light, and I noticed that i do this at Traffic lights. I don't know what gear number i am in but i change to something higher or lower depending on what i need for that set of lights ..... there was 5 sets between me and the shops


so i stand corrected

Rhodabike

My new bike has a compact crankset. On the one hand, it probably has all the gears I need for this part of the world, on the other hand, I don't like having to go up or down 4 cogs for every change with the front derailleur.
I think the most useful gearing I ever had was on my old touring bike with the 6-speed freewheel and half-step gearing (44-48). Half-step looks complicated at first, but it was easy to remember once I got used to the zig-zag shift pattern, and the gears were always fairly close together. I got 10 fully useable gears, with the granny ring as backup for really steep hills.

Rhodabike

That's why I like the hub-gear bike for traffic. It's not a pleasant bike to ride in any other respect, but I love it for stop-and-go riding just for the ability to shift while completely stopped.

bud16415

I have both doubles, triples, 3 speed and single speed on the 6 bikes I like to ride. And for different conditions and types of rides each has its own unique place.

But after working the most getting the correct gearing for me my touring bike with a triple x 9 has become my go to bike for so much more than loaded touring and it is without a doubt my preferred commuting bike and casual rider. There are such a wide range of people in this forum and combine that with the geography of where we all live it’s pointless to compare actual specs.

On the tour bike I have 27 possibilities if you look at every cross chained pair. I use 21 of those. There is overlap in my gearing but there isn’t repetition. I finally figured out for me it all started with the size of the center chain ring and compared it to a lot of options in the 9 speed cassettes available. I see a lot of talk above about keeping the tooth count close on the cassette but you have to keep in mind it’s not the tooth count but the percentage change cog to cog. A one tooth change on the small end is about 10% and a 3 tooth change on the other end is about the same. I looked at the center ring and the center cog as the starting point. I wanted as much of my average riding as I could to be covered with sequential rear shifting. I hated the trend everyone is doing on touring bikes to put mountain bike cranks on to get super low gears and then having half the gears you ride in split between the two chain rings. It works for some if the bike is just used for heavy touring but wasn’t for me on a multi-use bike. My big chain ring only gives me two additional tall gears one being extreme for all but downhill at a slower cadence keeping the legs going rather than coasting. The big thing I like is the large ring has 5 nice half step gears that work well on the times the center ring sequential shifting has me wishing for one in between but I mostly use the overlap gears as a range to ride in when I’m favoring taller gears and don’t want to keep making a front shift.

The granny most people use as a one shot bail out gear. And just like I didn’t care for the mtn gearing in the front I didn’t care for the mega gear in the back. I went as small as I could go on the granny gear knowing it would be a shift I wouldn’t want to do a lot but with the right cassette it gave me a range of 6 low gears to stay in when needed.

My setup is what worked for an older guy with a lifetime of abuse to the body’s joints. As a kid a single speed was all that was needed mashing any hill that came along and when you stalled jump off and run the bike to the top.

So 21 is my number and I might not use everyone every ride but I do use everyone sooner or later.

indyfabz

As someone who rides for sport, transportation and travel (fully loaded) over flat terrian and mountainous terrain, I say well put

stevel610 

1x8 Shimano Nexus 8. 24-76 gear inches. Enough range to go up mile long hills easily and down as fast as I want. IGH's are great! I think most people are over geared generally speaking. Even on my 27 speed Novara Safari I keep it in the middle chain ring and switch the 9 on the rear mostly.

Keith99

I happen to be big and fairly powerful. Oh and willing to do hills. I could ride in my little front ring all the time, that would be fine for the hills, but for the flats it would mean an overly low gear.

That would be acceptable if the flats were rare. The problem is that overall flat or near flat ground is the most common.

Having a gearing setup that keeps you in an optimal gear is therefor importnat on ht eflats. Not having the right gear on hte hills means knee problems.

JoeKahno

Birth Certificate, Passport, Marriage License Driver's License and Residency Permit all say I'm a Fred. I guess there's no denying it.

Swipe!

Birth Certificate, Passport, Driver's License and ACR-I card all say I'm Joe. But how do the Filipino's I pass on the street know that?

JoeKahno

I need three if they're the right three.

High gear, usable on the flats but not comfortable without at least a little tailwind or slight down grade.
Second, comfortable on the flat but still usable in a mild headwind or on a slight up grade.
Low, for dead slow traffic or actual hills.

I'm currently running a Nexus Inter-3 in the lower two gears while I wait for the replacement cog I ordered. I'm not a racer. I don't do group rides. More than half my riding is done in traffic moving 10 - 30 mph and more likely to drop out the bottom of that range than go over the top. Nearly all of it is on level ground. The next island over has some actual mountains but the worst I've had to deal with so far is the high arched bridge between here and there.

bbbean 

N+1

rudypyatt

Frankly I’m just getting back to riding after a couple years’ interruption. I have Sturmey-Archer SRF-3 hubs on both my bikes. Today I did 14 miles (what was once trivial distance) of mostly flat terrain, but it was very windy, and half the ride features a number of traffic lights. Clicking down to first gear at a stop, or when the wind came straight into the face (and on the one little rise) is perfect. I cruised in second (direct), but occasionally went up to top gear to rest.

As I get back into shape, I’ll deal with the hilly parts of NYC. I think three, around here (knowing that I am never going near a paceline), is enough.

BookFinder 

My Cannondale has 21 gears. Most of the time I stay in the big chainring and use 4 or 5 of the rear cogs. Truth told I could easily get by with a 8 or 10 speed drivetrain.